In recent years, utilization of biomass as an alternative material to petroleum has drawn attention due to concerns about depletion of petroleum resources and global warming. In particular, methods of preparing sugars by hydrolysis of biomass containing polysaccharides such as starch or cellulose have been actively studied. This is because various chemical products can be produced through microbial fermentation using sugars as feedstocks.
A cellulose-derived sugar liquid contains: sugar and as impurities, water-insoluble fine particles such as lignin, silica, calcium salts, aggregated proteins and undegraded cellulose, water-soluble macromolecules such as oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, tannin and proteins, low-molecular-weight fermentation inhibitors, inorganic salts, organic acids, and the like. As methods of removing such impurities, a method of separating fine particles into the feed side through filtration using a microfiltration membrane, a method of separating water-soluble macromolecules into the feed side through filtration using an ultrafiltration membrane, and a method of removing low-molecular weight compounds such as fermentation inhibitors from the filtrate side through a nanofiltration membrane or a reverse osmosis membrane are known (WO 2010/067785).
We discovered that, in a process of removing impurities from a cellulose-derived sugar liquid using a separation membrane, clogging of the separation membrane occurs as the operation continues for a long time. It could therefore be helpful to provide a method of washing to prevent a separation membrane from being clogged by impurities in a cellulose-derived sugar liquid, especially water-soluble macromolecules, in a process of producing a cellulose-derived sugar liquid using a separation membrane, thereby providing a method to efficiently remove impurities from the cellulose-derived sugar liquid.